Bread & Water

This entry is part 18 of 37 in the series Bridge to Nowhere: poems at mid-life

 


Direct link to video on Vimeo.

This is the first in a planned series of one-minute movies made in less than a day with text written in response to the film images. I include the text below for the benefit of those on dial-up, but I’m not sure it makes too much sense on its own.

Bread & Water

I cast my bread on
the water, but
it didn’t come back.
Did you call?
I wrote. I made tea
from every leaf in
the garden.
Would you know it if
you saw it again?

I would.
I would know it slowly.
I would know it as
a failed boat.
Wasn’t it full
of air pockets, like
a lung?
No, those
were just open
dates on a calendar.
It was fresh.
It had skin for a skin.
What will you do when
you tire of waiting?

I’ll whistle back to
the old steam grate.
I’ll lick the lenses
of my glasses until
the street looks clean.
What will you do
if the bread
comes back?

I’ll teach it to sink.

Another Good Question

Watch on Vimeowatch lower-res version on YouTube

I recently took the time to completely re-do this videopoem, which was a break-through video for me when I first made it a year and a half ago. I’ve now replaced that original with this new version (one of the main advantages of Vimeo over YouTube is that it allows one to upload a new file for an already-posted video), but you can still read what I originally said about it back on February 5, 2009. It was the first poetry video I made with the text in a spoken-word soundtrack instead of as silent captions. But more than that, it was the first in which film and poem were equal partners in a kind of dance. The footage had come first, and the text about five days later, but both changed dramatically in the editing.

My impetus to re-do it was simply the feeling that the audio quality could be improved, now that I have better audio-editing skills and software (Adobe Audition). When I went to look for the text, I discovered that I had apparently never saved it — a very rare oversight, but perhaps indicative of the extent to which I saw it as component rather than end product. I had to transcribe it from the video:

A good question never satisfies the way one might expect. It’s not like a conviction. There’s no warm glow of satisfaction. Everyone tells you, That’s a good question! But they don’t know how it torments you in secret with its indifference and its perplexing transformations. Living with the questions is like living with a house full of cats. Wouldn’t you rather have an uninterrupted sleep? Wouldn’t you rather be numb? Sure you would. But getting there involves a brief and jarring realignment of molecules, a hot iron fry pan going into the water, that squeal no real voice can begin to answer.

Once transcribed, I could see that it might need work: wasn’t “in secret” better left implied? Isn’t “warm glow” a bit of a cliché? As I worked through a second draft, trying to figure out where to put in line breaks, it occurred to me to try recasting the poem as a series of questions. At this point, the title changed from “The Good Question” to simply “Good Question.” Here’s the text I ended up generating for the new version of the video:

What makes a good question “good”?
Why doesn’t it ever satisfy, the way a conviction does?
Why doesn’t it impart an incandescent glow
& draw lost moths to its semblance of a moon?

Why do people say “That’s a good question”
instead of simply admitting “I don’t know”?
Why does one good question turn into so many others the closer you get?
Why can’t it stay round & whole?

When a theologian advocates living with the questions,
should we presume he has a house full of cats?
And is it wrong to prefer an uninterrupted sleep?
What if all the best questions led only to despair?

But how can we rid ourselves of them
without a jarring realignment of molecules,
like a hot iron fry pan going into the water?
And how do you answer that brief, inhuman squeal?

If anything, I think the text is actually less suitable now as a stand-alone poem, but it might be a better match for the film images. The image of the moon/(implied) bulb, for example, as well as the “round and whole” bit, were influenced by the snowball imagery in the video. The idea of questions breeding more questions would help prepare the listener for that house full of cats, I thought. Despair entered on its own during the writing, but stayed because it seemed to form an additional feedback loop with the video imagery.

I experimented with different arrangements of the footage, but in the end went back almost to what I had at the beginning. I did decide to include music in the soundtrack this time, a piece by Michael Lambright from Jamendo.com, licenced Attribution-Noncommercial under the Creative Commons. I wanted something from a solo instrument that was simulataneously spirited and a bit doleful, and “Poirot” seemed to fit the bill. The fact that its title referenced Agatha Christie’s famous fictional detective cemented the link.

I think the ending still needs work…

*

Over at the Moving Poems discussion blog, I’ve talked videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves into sharing his latest “summary of videopoetry.” Here’s the essence of his definition:

Videopoetry is a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of text with images and sound. In the measured blending of these 3 elements, it produces in the viewer the realization of a poetic experience.

The poetic juxtaposition of the elements implies an appreciation of the weight and reach of each element; the method is analogous to the poet’s process of selecting just-the-right word or phrase and positioning these in a concentrated “vertical” pattern.

To differentiate it from other forms of cinema, the principal function of a videopoem is to demonstrate the process of thought and the simultaneity of experience, expressed in words — visible and/or audible — whose meaning is blended with but not illustrated by the images.

Please stop by and read the rest.

A Bigfoot Poem, revisited

Direct link to the video on YouTube

Poet Nic S.’s reading of my poem at Whale Sound — her marvelous audiopoem blog which was already becoming one of my favorite online poetry sites even before she asked if she might include one of my own pieces — prompted me to revisit this poem and see what I might do in the way of envideoing it. This is just one idea, and perhaps not a particularly good one. I looked at a bunch of YouTube videos purporting to show Bigfoot, and after a while I realized they reminded me of some shaky, fuzzy footage of my own…

It was actually another poet-blogger, Scott Standridge at The Sonnet Project, whose reprint from the Via Neg archives brought the poem to Nic’s attention, I think. As I said to Scott when I found his post, I’d pretty much forgotten the poem. I’m grateful to both of them for helping me rediscover it.

Sea of wood frogs


Direct link to video.

Mares
by Juan Ramón Jiménez

Siento que el barco mío
ha tropezado, allá en el fondo,
con algo grande.

¡Y nada
sucede! Nada…Quietud…Olas….
—¿Nada sucede; o es que la sucedido todo,
y estamos ya, tranquilos, en lo nuevo?—

Seas

I sense that my boat
has struck, deep down,
against some massive thing.

And nothing happens!
Nothing… silence… waves…
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and we are already resting in the new life?

*

It may be a mistake to try and make a video for one of my favorite poems: I’ll never be satisfied with the results. In this case, my dissatisfaction is especially acute because one of the main things that made the footage so compelling to watch on my home computer — the complex patterns of waves — is excessively pixelated at anything but the highest of resolutions. Also, there’s some absurdity in visually equating the surface of a small, vernal pond with Jimenez’ “Seas.” Oh well.

For the translation, after much thought I decided to borrow from Robert Bly’s translation and render “lo nuevo” as “the new life,” instead of simply “the new,” because I think that is the gist of it. As always with my translations, I’d welcome suggestions of alternatives. I was trying to figure out some way to use “calm,” or a variation thereof, for “tranquilos,” but “becalmed” seemed over-reaching. It’s frustrating to have a clear idea of what the poem means and be unable to quite convey it.

Harlequin ladybird


Video link.

Part videopoem, part music video. The music is by the Polish composer efiel on Jamendo.com, who made it available for noncommercial remix with attribution under the same Creative Commons licence, so this whole video is also so licenced (BY-NC-SA). This is the acoustic version of his otherwise electronic single, Home, with the first instrumental break repeated twice to give me time to get the reading in. The singer (as we learn in the notes for his album 2, which is also available on Last.fm) is Joanna Szwej. The creatures in the video are the Asian or harlequin ladybird beetle, Harmonia axyridis, filmed swarming one of the windows in my house yesterday afternoon. Here’s the poem.

Harlequin Ladybird

The ladybird
is a hard pill,
a dose of red medicine.
Her dogged way
of walking &
the gleam on
her elytra suggest
a certain brittleness,
a gift for sudden
flights of rage.
You wouldn’t think
such a small mouth
could pack
such a painful bite.
Like everyone,
I found her cute
at first, until I realized
there were many more
versions of her, &
they had infiltrated
every crack. Now
she lets herself in
whenever she wants,
only to spend all
her time at
the window.
The pungent scent
of her defensive spray
permeates the house.
What is she afraid of?
I begin to suspect
that those delicate
underwings are really
an airmail letter
containing the last,
unwary words of someone
who perished in
a house fire, the way
she keeps unfolding
& refolding them —
two sheets of onionskin
tucked against a small,
bad heart.

A thorough revision of this poem.

Gacela of Unforeseen Love (videopoem)


Video link.

I’ll be sharing this at Moving Poems in a couple of weeks, but here’s a sneak peek. For the Spanish text (or my translation), see “Federico Garcí­a Lorca: two translations,” my post from 2005.

“Gacela” means “ghazal,” but I decided to keep the Spanish word this time to avoid confusion, since Lorca’s notion of what constitutes a ghazal differs so much from the practice of contemporary English-language poets (to say nothing of Arabic poets). This was part of Lorca’s 23-poem cycle Divan del Tamarit, an homage to the great Moorish civilization of his native Andalusia.

Lorca’s free adaptations of the ghazal and qasida reflected the influence of the anthology Poemas Arábigoandaluces translated by Emilio García Gómez, which created a minor sensation among Spanish readers and intellectuals when it was published in 1930. Poets of the renowned Generation of 27, which included Lorca, found it especially revelatory. Rafael Albertí later told an interviewer, “That book opened our eyes to all that Andalusian past, and brought it so close to us that it left me with a great preoccupation for those writers, those Andalusian writers, Arabs and Jews, born in Spain… If one studies Arab-Andalusian poetry carefully, so full of metaphors and miniaturism, we will see that there is a continuity with the later poetry, of Góngora, Soto de Rojas, and centuries later, with our own.” (I’m quoting from the introduction to an English translation of the anthology, Poems of Arab Andalusia, by Cola Franzen.)

The music, as noted in the credits, is by Antony Raijekov. It’s from his Jamendo.com collection Jazz U, to which he applied a liberal Creative Commons license that allows for remixes.

Walking on water


Video link.

Walking on water, I forgot about the fish
in their white gardens of coral.

Walking on the snow, I forgot about spring,
though others knew to dig for it.

My snowshoes kept me from sinking
& I glided over the drifts
almost as lightly as the shadows of the trees.

And watching those shadows,
I even managed to forget about the trees themselves.

This is what’s wrong with that dreamy kind of faith
that depends on miracles. We don’t need
one more way to keep our distance.

 

oak shadows

Ars Poetica?

Video link.

Czeslaw Milosz reads his poem. This is a different translation from the one he did with Lillian Vallee for the Collected Poems.

I made this thinking I might post it on Moving Poems, but I’m not sure it quite qualifies as “the best video poetry on the web.” Nevertheless, I enjoy matching poems to footage like this, and I happen to think it’s a pretty good fit, assuming I’m correct in reading a fairly light-hearted tone into the poem.

I wholeheartedly concur with the sentiment that “the world is different from what it seems to be / and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.” The closing assertion, that poems should only be written rarely and reluctantly, strikes me as a rather strong prescription: potentially life-saving for some poets and very dangerous for others. I do love the next-to-last stanza, though (in the canonical translation):

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Undead


Direct link to video.

I got some half-decent footage of crows mobbing what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk this afternoon. I wasn’t quick enough to get the hawk, so it didn’t make for much of a nature video even by my low standards, so I decided I’d mess around with it and try to make a videopoem instead. Here’s the text:

If the dead can’t rest,
it’s because we won’t let them.
We storm,
we harry,
we decry,
we implore.
We make them star
in our horror shows
for that surge of adrenalin
that lets us know
we’re alive —
as if they our dear departed
were the ones out for blood.

Jamendo.com was down, so I went to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio collection instead and quickly found some suitable music. The main advantage of searching on Jamendo is that you can filter out Creative Commons licenses that specify “no derivatives.” But I think from now on I’ll probably try the Internet Archive first, because it seems to have much more of the kind of music I’m looking for.

*

For what it’s worth, this is my 3,000th post at Via Negativa. Granted, 466 of those are just quote-and-link posts in the Smorgasblog category. And this figure does not include the 719 Morning Porch posts, which are in a separate blog. I mention them because, in my first several years of blogging, I almost certainly would’ve included them as part of the Via Negativa stream — and someday when I stop keeping the Morning Porch record, I will probably import all those posts into the VN archives.

As luck would have it, we just passed another milestone a week ago: the 12,000th approved comment, which was left by Dana Guthrie Martin. That excludes the several thousand comments that were lost when Via Negativa moved to WordPress on April Fool’s Day, 2006. And just to keep things in perspective: I’ve logged 1,118,233 spam comments during that same period.

Lines (videopoem)


Link to video.

A video adaptation of a poem I wrote back in 2006 and included in my online collection Shadow Cabinet.

This videopoem idea has been brewing for a while. I finally got a chance to shoot the contrail footage last week, on one of those days when some of the contrails remain and others quickly fade, depending I suppose on the elevation of the jet. As usual, though, the most time-consuming part of the video-making process was finding the right music. The wordless, a capella song is by a Belgian electronica band called Silence, who are generous enough to copyleft all their material. The track happened to be just the right length, so I didn’t have to alter it in any way.